What the West Country Folk Wanted.
IT has been well said, with regard to the right to accredit and interpret God’s word assumed by the church of Rome, that if a child receive a letter from his father, the authority lies in the letter itself, not in the one who may chance to be the bearer of it. The messenger might try to keep back part of the letter, and to explain away the rest, but the child is bound to receive and obey the whole of the letter, as coming to him with all the authority of his father. He is to believe the message which comes to him because it is his father’s word, not because someone else tells him it is, true. So faith in God’s word must be confidence in it because it is His word―because He has really spoken―otherwise it is not faith in God at all.
This seems clear and simple enough, and yet it is only by God’s grace to us that any of us have known what it is to rest the soul for eternity upon the bare word of God, just because it is His word. What is natural to us all, is to seek some other resting place, and if we know anything of the deceitfulness of our own hearts, we can understand how it came to pass that this authority over the consciences of men, claimed by those who professed to be the sole guardians and interpreters of God’s word, was so readily accepted by the people. Thus we find that one of the special rights for which the country folk cried out so loudly in the time of our last King Edward was, the right to have the English Bibles banished from their churches, and prayers (or as they called it, “mass”) said once more in Latin after the good old fashion.
Truly, like children who cry for some hurtful thing and will not be pacified, they knew not what they did. Bred up in the ignorance and superstition which had been the growth of those dark ages, what wonder if they mistook the empty forms of religion for the true worship of God, and thought of the Latin sentences, with their sounding cadences, as words whereby, in some way which they did not understand, but which the priest who repeated them did, God would be rendered merciful to their manifold sins and transgressions. They were taught to believe, too, that the blessed Virgin Mary, whose pictured image was so familiar to them, and of whom they had so often heard that she was kind and pitiful, would intercede with her holy Child for them, that they might be saved. Thus we can understand how grievous a thing it was to them when ruthless hands roughly tore from the churches the images upon which they had been accustomed to look with reverent and loving eyes. It was terrible to see so much which they had been taught to hold sacred being swept away, and to have, in many cases, but little given them in its place; for, by people ignorant of reading, the blessing of an open Bible was hardly understood. Their knowledge of Scripture was chiefly obtained from the mysteries or miracle-plays, which had lately been forbidden as profane. These were exhibitions in which sometimes the whole of the sacred history, from the creation to the last day, sometimes a portion, was acted. These plays were at first performed in the churches, with some show of reverence, the actors being priests, but they gradually became more and more irreverent, until the most sacred “mystery” was little better than a Punch and Judy show. Still, we may well believe, especially if any words of scripture were put into the mouths of the players, that even such exhibitions as those may have been used by God to the blessing of the poor, to whom so little means of help or comfort was afforded, for He who makes the wrath of man to praise Him, can also turn the folly of man to account, through His grace.
We have seen that those poor people who clamored against English Bibles, also demanded that the sacrament, or, as they would have said, the host, should be elevated and worshipped, and that the mass should be said in Latin. Most of us, brought up in a Protestant country, have but a vague idea of what this means; but in Roman Catholic countries, the people speak of going to mass just as in England they would speak of going to church. It is difficult to explain what the mass really is―what it meant to thousands in the times of which we are reading, without using language which would shock a child who has learned from God’s word in any degree to understand the saving value of the atoning sacrifice of Christ, once offered for the remission of sins. Yet without some knowledge of it we shall not understand for what the martyrs of the time of Queen Mary, of whose faith and patience we have so often heard, suffered and died; we shall not understand how precious in God’s sight was the death of His faithful witnesses, nor how much we owe to them―for it was for no light matter that they laid down their lives.
The name itself is of no importance: “mass” is only the fragment of a form of words in Latin used to signify that the meeting was over, and the congregation dismissed. The word “host” carries with it the error which underlies the whole doctrine of the Romish Church: it comes from the Latin too, and means the one struck down―the victim. It was the name given to the piece of bread―which was called the “wafer,” from an old word, meaning a cake―which had been consecrated by the priest, and was held on high that the people should adore it, as the very body of Christ.
In the times of the early Christians it was a simple and blessed thing for them to remember the Lord’s death, in the way in which He had Himself appointed. By degrees, however, this act of “showing the Lord’s death,” so solemn and touching in its simplicity, had been surrounded by various ceremonies. From being spoken of as service commemorative of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, it began to be spoken of as itself a sacrifice: “the sacrament of the altar.” All the prayer connected with it was made in an unknown tongue―much of it was even secretly whispered, especially those mystic words of consecration which were believed to have the power of changing the wafer of bread into the body of Christ. The priest was seen by the people to draw near the altar with much reverent observance, bowing, crossing himself, kissing the altar: until at last they believed that he, by consecrating the host, was offering for them a sacrifice which had power to take away their sins, and to set them right with God.
The priest, then, in the sacrifice of the mass, pretended to offer Christ still, as a propitiatory sacrifice, for the sins of the living―those men and women who knelt around him; and the dead―those whom they had known and loved on earth, and of whom they longed to be assured that their spirits were in safety and at rest.
And what was the sacrifice which the priest thus offered, continually, in the presence of the people? Here, again, we shrink from uttering the profane falsehood by which the souls of men were deluded; it is nevertheless true that when, after the words of consecration, the priest, on his knees, raised the wafer on high, while, by ringing a bell, he gave warning to the people to worship it, it was presented to them as the very body of Christ, and worshipped by them as if, as a writer of the time said, “Christ had appeared in the clouds.” After thus “elevating the host,” the priest was accustomed to break some of the bread, and put it into the cup; saying in Latin, “May this mixture and consecration of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be to us who receive it effectual to eternal life” ... adding the prayer, “Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us: grant us Thy peace!”
The priest alone drank the wine, but the people were allowed to take the bread.
Thus had the taking of the Lord’s Supper in memory of Him by those who had been saved by His atoning death, been changed into a continual offering up of what was said to be the body and blood of Christ. Thus, in Christian times, had those who professed to teach the true worship of God led the people back to the times before Christ had come and had died, when the priest stood, “offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.” We are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that if the sacrifice of Christ were to be repeated He must often have suffered; but in this pretense to have a sacrifice still offered up on earth, there was no thought of suffering, no “shedding of blood,” without which “is no remission.” And this mockery of a continual offering was carried on, while the blessed Lord, having once suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God, had forever sat down at the right hand of God, no more to suffer, no more to die―for “by one offering He has perfected forever those that are sanctified.” It has been well said that a continual offering for sins was a continual memorial of them; proving that they were not put away.
The doctrine which teaches that after the words of consecration the bread and wine are actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, is called the doctrine of transubstantiation, or a change of substance. It was for refusing to accept this as an article of faith that many had suffered, from the days when the New Testament first began to go abroad among the people, even to the times of Queen Mary, when the question, which had always been a very serious one, as it was the central doctrine of the Church of Rome, became the grand test by which she tried those who were suspected of being unfaithful to her teachings.
The belief in transubstantiation was especially enjoined by the Act of Six Articles, that Act concerning which the rioters in the late reign had prayed that it might again be in force. Alas, they knew not what they did: it was under this Act, so soon to be again made law, that the penalty of death overtook so many who could not yield to the teaching of the Church on this point during the short but eventful reign of Queen Mary.
An incident which took place at the battle of Cowton Moor, in the time of Stephen, lets us see very clearly in what light the “sacrament of the altar” was then regarded. It was where the Scottish king, taking up the cause of his niece, came across the border, leaving destruction and misery in his track, that the aged Archbishop of York mustered the country-folk, as well as the men-at-arms and knights, to resist the invaders. The battle, in which the Scots were defeated, was called “The Battle of the Standard,” because the English rallied round no banner, stained with the blood of many a hard-fought field, but had for their standard, carried in a wagon, a mast, which bore on high a silver box containing a consecrated wafer. Thus we see that the host was carried into the battle with the idea that its presence there would secure victory, even as the ark, the sign of the presence of God among His people, had been carried into the battle by the Israelites of old.
In those days, besides the ordinary sacrifice of the mass, there were masses said for various objects: some for commemorating departed saints; some for rain, in seasons of drought; a special mass for avoiding sudden death; and the people were plainly told, concerning the benefits conferred by hearing mass―the words are taken from a service book of the time of Henry the Eighth― “That day thou hearest thy mass, God granteth thee needful and lawful things. That day idle oaths and forgotten sins been forgiven. That day thou shalt not leese thine eye-sight, ne dy no sudden death; ne in the time of the mass thou shalt not wax aged. Every step thitherward and homeward an angel shall reckon.”
At the same time it was enjoined, “Lewd” (that is, unlearned) “men and women to dispute of this sacrifice are utterly forboden: for it is enough for them to believe as holy Church teacheth them.”